Fuck BlackRock

6 months ago by A404 to c/flippanarchy

EggInDisguise 142 points 6 months ago

My mother was actually thinking about selling my grandparents house to them.

I'm not sure if I changed her mind, but I straight up told her the second she mentioned them that I would burn the house down before the sale went through and would be chilling in a cell with a smile on my face for it.

She decided not to sell to a company.

Does that make me unhinged? Maybe. But that's one less house going to a rental company and one more family getting a house they'll live in.

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A404 59 points 6 months ago

You did the right thing. They would have just used it as currency anyways.

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harambe69 113 points 6 months ago

Make a secondary house all but impossible to own via property tax, and make it illegal for corporations to own property. Watch housing cost plummet through the floor.

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reallykindasorta 31 points 6 months ago

100%. Right now you can write your empty property off on your taxes as a loss in most places*

*In the US

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harambe69 21 points 6 months ago

It's insanity. Should be the complete opposite. If there's no renter in it? More tax!

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nforminvasion 16 points 6 months ago

Oh not only can you, it's encouraged. I see libs talking on Reddit about how it's actually better than renting because you take on a risk when renting and an empty house builds value and doesn't run the chance of damage.

This is of course why private property sucks, but if the general populous can't stomach that, I'd be willing to settle for georgism.

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Taleya 7 points 6 months ago

Good lord those people are idiots. Few things kill a house faster than being uninhabited

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Wilco 19 points 6 months ago

The people that would write these laws are the ones profiting off the exploits in the system. The politicians literally get legal bribes to allow the behaviour.

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harambe69 5 points 6 months ago

Threaten them, or threaten their votes.

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spicehoarder 16 points 6 months ago

The issue is that they're already doing this with HOAs. They don't care if they owne your house, but they own the dirt under it and can evict you for bullshit reasons. Make corporate HOAs illegal too

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Hakuso 16 points 6 months ago

Make corporate HOAs illegal

FTFY

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spicehoarder 7 points 6 months ago

I was waiting for this comment, and it's the reason I framed it this way. Because an HOA done right is pretty much a commune. You can chose the membership terms, penalties, and organization scope.

I've seen some where not paying your dues simply locks you out of amenities like pool access, and that's it. So it's kind of what you make it. Doesn't have to be the nightmare most deal with.

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Hakuso 6 points 6 months ago

That could be handled with a communal spaces, a HOA tends to end run by the "Karens" trying to micromanage everyone, and the boys who think they're Wyatt Earp running around enforcing stuff.

There's no excuse for meddling in the affairs of your neighbor, unless what they are doing is literally dangerous, as much as a flamingo in the yard pains me to see it doesn't actually hurt me.

Same to say my raised beds don't hurt anyone, breaking the boring theme of crappy lawns isn't reason to tack notices to the door, and a lot of them will attack people near the HOA not just the ones in it.

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osanna 5 points 6 months ago
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tempest 23 points 6 months ago

I mean a lot of what BlackRock sells is index funds like vanguard etc.

That's a lot of people's retirements more than it's private equity.

I think you'll have more luck changing the rules of the game rather than chasing the players. If black rock disappeared tomorrow all that money would just move to another ETF manager and you would instantly have another BlackRock.

Also I think BlackRock (which is far from blameless in a whole lot of affairs) gets confused with black stone. It was the latter more directly investing in real estate iirc.

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Throbbing_banjo 5 points 6 months ago

Any time I see a comment/thread about this stuff I just assume the OP heard Blackstone does this and doesn't realize they're separate companies.

Granted, Blackrock does have a few real estate funds, but they're mostly in commercial property. They don't buy homes.

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scott_anon_21 4 points 6 months ago

Regardless, it is raising good points and information.

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gandalf_der_12te 14 points 6 months ago

Also what i find very interesting about this topic is how demographics plays into this

i personally think that the UN predictions about how the population numbers are going to evolve are utter bullshit. it is well known that the population pyramid looks something like this:

and it's going to get thinner and thinner at the bottom as time progresses.

anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks "if i build a house today, there's a good chance that there won't be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off". and municipalities, i'm afraid, are way too under-invested in building social housing in general because that would be communism or sth.

after a quick search on the internet, about 1.6 million people live in public housing in the US in 2024. that's about 0.5 percent. Source

Meanwhile in Europe, about 9.3% (45 million people) people live in public housing according to this article, with some countries like Austria having 24%. (8% of EU according to this OECD study).

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grue 4 points 6 months ago

anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks “if i build a house today, there’s a good chance that there won’t be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off”.

First of all, that would only apply to companies with a build-and-hold business model, not to ones that develop a property and then sell it off to owner-occupants. Clearly, there do exist people who want to be owner-occupants, so the real issue is how to construct the regulations etc. to incentivize the latter business model.

Second, even build-and-hold companies wouldn't give a fuck about 30 years from now; the asset would be fully depreciated by then anyway. If you're in business to make a profit, you're looking to do it way sooner than 30 years.

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gandalf_der_12te 3 points 6 months ago

First of all, that would only apply to companies with a build-and-hold business model, not to ones that develop a property and then sell it off to owner-occupants. Clearly, there do exist people who want to be owner-occupants, so the real issue is how to construct the regulations etc. to incentivize the latter business model.

fair point. i had completely not considered that. especially as we were discussing blackrock which is a buy-and-hold business model.

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trackball_fetish 13 points 6 months ago
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A404 8 points 6 months ago

I am sorry to hear that :< I hope you will be able to find a home.

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boonhet 12 points 6 months ago

Blackstone. Everyone blames BlackRock, but it's Blackstone doing this. BlackRock is maybe a little bit evil, but mostly they sell ETFs, so ways for retail investors to invest in the stock market indexes. They make a fee off that, and at their size that's a huge amount of money already. Blackstone is more active about what it invests in, it strategically buys up neighborhoods so they can unilaterally raise rents. Among all kinds of other morally dubious investments.

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vane 5 points 6 months ago

Does BlackRock own a lot of real estate?
Yes, BlackRock is one of the largest real estate investors in the world, with over $60 billion in total real estate assets under management.
https://bestrealestatemarket.com/...
🤔

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boonhet 1 point 6 months ago

$60 billion

That figure itself is likely wrong, because this is a 3rd party website with very weird grammar, other sources (including Blackrock's website) point towards more like 30 billion or less. It's also tiny compared to Blackstone.

Blackstone has 300 billion in AUM in their real estate funds and 600 billion as their global real estate portfolio and according to themselves, 42% of it is homes they rent out

BlackRock's public statement is also that they do not buy single family homes in the US. They finance construction and mortgages, though, so they still profit off it, but not from rent.

Also, BlackRock's CEO has been advocating for the importance of ESG (Environmental, Sustainability, Governance) in investment funds to the point that multiple red states refused to do business with BlackRock. Fink was on good terms with Obama and was going to be Clinton's treasury secretary if she'd won.

Meanwhile, Blackstone's CEO is a longtime friend of Donald Trump and compared Obama's carried interest tax hike plans Hitler invading Poland.

They're both gigantic corporations and no billionaire is your friend, but there's one that's trying to be about as good as you can be while still being a bloodsucking billionaire running a trillion dollar megacorp, whereas the other also actively wants to make the world a worse place. And the former always gets the attention for what the latter is doing, because the name is more famous.

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vane 1 point 6 months ago path: 0 23417331 23420612 23421255 23426908, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
MIDItheKID 2 points 6 months ago
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boonhet 1 point 6 months ago

Blackstone's real estate AUM is about 10x as big as BlackRock's and according to themselves, 42% of it is rental homes (be they single family or apartments, both short and long term). BlackRock states they do not buy single-family homes in the US, but do invest in new constructions as well as mortgages.

Blackrock is one of the 3 funds that controls the entire world. Them, Vanguard, and State Street own nearly 90% of the S&P 500 as well as eachother.

I mean that's just AUM, same as for Blackstone. They don't directly own it all. I myself have a 5 figure sum in BlackRock's ETFs that will be transferred out at the beginning of May (it's through my country's national pension system so it took several months to get that done, but I'm going all in on Europe and Asia on non-US-managed ETFs now). If you're in the US and have a 401k, you're probably also one of those people whose assets are part of that nearly 90%.

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piccolo 2 points 6 months ago

Different compqny same people running it.

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boonhet -3 points 6 months ago

Source? Or do you just mean (((same people)))?

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piccolo 2 points 6 months ago

Blackstone also ventured into other businesses, most notably investment management. In 1987 Blackstone entered into a 50–50 partnership with the founders of BlackRock, Larry Fink (current CEO of BlackRock), and Ralph Schlosstein (CEO of Evercore). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone_Inc.

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boonhet 2 points 6 months ago

In 1995, Blackstone sold its stake in BlackRock to PNC Financial Services for $240 million. Between 1995 and 2014, PNC reported $12 billion in pretax revenues and capital gains from BlackRock. Schwarzman later described the selling of BlackRock as his worst business decision ever.

That's like 4 paragraphs later lol

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ddplf 1 point 6 months ago

^ this guy chans

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boonhet 1 point 6 months ago

I do not, but some of these conspiracy theories do have their roots in antisemitism. Of course, Israel has done wonders to legitimize antisemitism and the CEOs of both companies support Israel to one degree or another, so at this rate we may as well say that the zionists control the world, much like conspiracy theorists used to say it about Jews in general.

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Kazel 6 points 6 months ago

lacht in Friedrich Merz

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A404 4 points 6 months ago

What did he do again?

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Kazel 4 points 6 months ago

Rente "nur noch als Basisabsicherung" und dann an der Börse zocken mit unseren Rentengeldern, dann kann sich Blackrock schön die Taschen voll machen (sein ehemaliger Arbeitgeber). Ansonsten noch der Ausverkauf Deutschland's, Kaputtstreichen der Krankenversicherung, das ständigen Hetzen gegen die eigene Bevölkerung usw usf

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W98BSoD 5 points 6 months ago

Pensions "only as basic security" and then gambling on the stock market with our pension money, then BlackRock (his former employer) can line its pockets nicely. Otherwise, there's the sell-off of Germany, the dismantling of health insurance, the constant vilification of the population, etc., etc.

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osanna 4 points 6 months ago
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Draegur 3 points 6 months ago

Saint Luigi, hear our prayer. May justice rain upon the parasitic real estate holdings firms.

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Saledovil 0 points 6 months ago

You become a Saint once you get into heaven. You sort of have to die before you can get to heaven, and Luigi is still alive.

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Waraugh 2 points 6 months ago

I like their food

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gandalf_der_12te -20 points 6 months ago

this whole thing just doesn't add up in my head.

people will bash blackrock for owning houses but really, what is actually happening here?

governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?

You can't ban corporate houses if there's no alternative. There needs to be an alternative first, otherwise you're just creating a vacuum, and as the proverb goes, a vacuum always sucks.

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disorderly 29 points 6 months ago

Blackrock isn't a housing company or developer, it's an investment group. What's happening here is that a group that hires a lot of very smart people to manipulate market values has found an easy mark in housing.

The housing shortage is fueled by artificially high prices, not square footage or bedrooms. That's what you're missing.

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boonhet 1 point 6 months ago

BlackRock also doesn't buy up housing. Blackstone does, BlackRock catches all the flak because nobody knows they're separate companies. Blackstone is able to continue with zero criticism.

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Baked86 -1 points 6 months ago

But mainly fuelled by lack of supply increasing demand and therefore price

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Taleya 5 points 6 months ago

The supply is being artificially restricted.

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gandalf_der_12te -7 points 6 months ago

so what you're saying is that market manipulation (= monopolies) is the problem, not companies owning houses?

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disorderly 20 points 6 months ago

I'm saying that companies owning houses is the market manipulation, neighbor.

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reallykindasorta 4 points 6 months ago

Your solution (city owned properties) does help solve the issue but it works because it skips the step where a developer builds a property and then it goes to market where we must compete with blackrock to purchase it. It sounds like you are for cutting institutions out of the equation and agree they are a problem so I’m a bit confused. Banning companies like blackrock from competing with residents would similarly help.

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cassandrafatigue 4 points 6 months ago

How do you type so much while deep throating corpo dick? Do you just have absolutely no gag reflex? How does one learn this skill?

You realize ownership isnt creation, right? I genuinely have to ask here.

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gandalf_der_12te 4 points 6 months ago

i'm literally advocating for higher housing creation. i specifically stated

governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?

Which is as direct a request of municipalities to build social housing as it can be. I don't get how people interpret that as "corpo dick sucking"?!?

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Hakuso 2 points 6 months ago

This is why BlackStone/BlackRock and places like it buy them.

There are enough empty homes now to end homelessness completely, but putting them into circulation would lower costs by reducing demand, so they make money by keeping them empty so the ones that are available will be valued much higher.

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gandalf_der_12te 1 point 6 months ago

that's exactly what a monopoly does. one should look into how to apply anti-monopoly laws on the housing market more effectively.

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cassandrafatigue 1 point 6 months ago

And thats fine, but no city is going to build new social housing; would be communism. The landlords would crucify anyone who tried. Maybe literally.

Gotta use that slick fatty landlord blood to lube up those locks, get people housed. Including corpo landlords. Their very existence implies political oressure.

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grue -41 points 6 months ago

The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not. Even if every market participant were an individual, that (presumably not overly wealthy) single mother of four is still going to get out-competed.

The only actual solution is to increase supply, which means abolishing the wealthy-favoring laws that make it illegal to build (i.e. the laws mandating things like single-family houses and minimum parking requirements).


Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y'all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.

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UnderpantsWeevil 46 points 6 months ago

The law of supply and demand still applies whether you try to paint one of the participants as a villain or not.

Where do middle men live in this equation? What about lenders, administrators, and housing developers?

The only actual solution is to increase supply

Ten houses are on the market. These houses range from $250k to $5M in listed price.

I have $20k for a down payment and $200k in borrowing power.

You have $30k for a down payment and $300k in borrowing power.

Berkshire Hathaway has $373.31 Billion for down payments and functionally unlimited borrowing power.

How many extra houses need to be built before you or I can outbid BH for a home?

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Alk 8 points 6 months ago

Let's find out!

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UnderpantsWeevil 10 points 6 months ago

Get cracking, scout!

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cassandrafatigue 1 point 6 months ago

I think the most efficient way to get people housed with that is to build something much smaller than a house.

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gandalf_der_12te 0 points 6 months ago

I mean sure we can ban institutional investors from buying up houses in your area, but the question is: will new houses stlil continue to be built? or are houses mostly built because the developers intend to sell them to institutional investors that can pay high prices for it?

in any case, the opposite of institutional investment is social housing. you can't only ban one without also pushing the other.

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UnderpantsWeevil 4 points 6 months ago

will new houses stlil continue to be built?

Yes, obviously.

the opposite of institutional investment is social housing. you can’t only ban one without also pushing the other.

I would go farther and say institutional investment undermines social housing, as social housing cuts into the profits of institutional investors.

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grue -17 points 6 months ago

Doesn't matter, because even if Berkshire Hathaway is eliminated from the bidding, when a dozen buyers with $200k or $300k in buying power are in the market and only one house is for sale because it's literally illegal for more to be built, only one of you is going to be able to get the house!

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protist 23 points 6 months ago

I really don't get your angle. Let's say there are 8 entities seeking a house, 3 of which are corporations. Ban corporations from owning single family homes, and there's an immediate drop in demand, so the current supply satisfies more individuals. Why are you arguing against this?

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grue -3 points 6 months ago

Let’s say there are 8 entities seeking a house, 3 of which are corporations. Ban corporations from owning single family homes, and there’s an immediate drop in demand

No there is not. Those corporations exist to make profit, and profit (in the long run) only comes from either tenants paying to occupy the house or selling it on to some other owner who will then either occupy it themselves or find tenants of their own. Even if it's a speculative bubble right now, sooner or later that game of musical chairs has to end and people have to sit down; otherwise they lose.

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UnderpantsWeevil 17 points 6 months ago

even if Berkshire Hathaway is eliminated

How many properties is BH sitting on unsold? How many are going to open up with the death of the Boomer homeowner generation?

Between 13.1 million and 14.6 million Boomers are projected to "exit homeownership" between 2026 and 2036. Who will own those homes when they are gone?

it’s literally illegal for more to be built

Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes

We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus. What we lack is jobs paying at the going mortgage rate

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cassandrafatigue 3 points 6 months ago

There are dumb laws in some places privileging things like sfh over apartments, to the point of exclusion. But more to their point:

i stubbed my toe, so this giant steel I beam that has impaled me is helping actually. I need the ton if steel currently pressing up against my remaining lung and protruding 20 feet in front of and behind me, or i wont be able to walk.

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grue -8 points 6 months ago

Show my the corner is the country where it is illegal to build new homes

Just look at any zoning map. It's all the (usually) yellow parts, i.e. the single-family-zoned areas, which make up the vast bulk of most cities' residential land area.

We have, if anything, an enormous vacant housing surplus.

Sure, in the exurbs nobody actually wants to live in!

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FooBarrington 15 points 6 months ago

So suddenly the law of supply and demand conveniently no longer applies? By removing demand from the market, we're not lowering prices?

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grue -5 points 6 months ago

Do you think these investors just have magic unlimited funds to hoard vacant housing forever? No. They exist to make a profit, which means sooner or later they either have to get occupants into those units or sell them on to somebody who will. This "additional" demand from property hoarders who apparently (according to your logic) love vacant buildings because they're fucking morons who hate money is, in the long run, fictional.

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cassandrafatigue 5 points 6 months ago

So we should let bh get the house, instead of any of us?

What purpose does bh serve here? And what drugs are you doing to believe this shit?

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grue -1 points 6 months ago

What purpose does bh serve here? And what drugs are you doing to believe this shit?

Why are you misrepresenting my argument? I never claimed BH served a purpose. If anything, my argument is closer to the opposite, which is that their presence or absence makes little difference at all.

What drugs are you doing to disbelieve that physical space exists and that not everybody who wants a single-family house with a yard in the middle of a fucking city gets to have one?

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JangleJack 21 points 6 months ago

Supply is a problem and I agree about existing density-blocking laws. However this is not an either/or situation. Market effects on pricing are aggregate, not annectdotal. Taking private equity out of the market would certainly lower demand. Plenty of housing are sitting empty or underoccupied right now because of speculation.

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UnderpantsWeevil 11 points 6 months ago

And plenty of units are converted rentals that leverage the borrowing power of the owner to upcharge the tenant.

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gandalf_der_12te -1 points 6 months ago
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grue -12 points 6 months ago

The effect of zoning laws dwarfs the effect of private equity, to the point that focusing on the latter is absolutely just making a scapegoat to avoid fixing the actual problem.

People just love to blame private equity because they want to eat their cake and have it too (own a single-family house in the middle of a city, for a price they can afford) and can't bear to face the reality that that is fundamentally impossible as a matter of geometry.

It's real fucking simple, people: if 10 families want to live in the same acre of land, they don't all get to each own a single-family house on a one-acre lot! One of them gets to (for a huge price), and the rest get physically displaced. The only way for something else to happen is for the law to change so that more housing units can be built on that acre, but the spatially-inevitable consequence of that is that each family doesn't get their own house with a 1-acre yard.

You fundamentally cannot have it both ways, but people don't want to accept that so they blame private equity instead.


I'm not defending private equity in the slightest, mind you! By all means, fucking murder them all if you want; IDGAF. I'm just saying y'all are gonna be all surprised_pikachu.jpg when it turns out to do fuck-all to solve the actual problem.


Edit: the irrational downvotes on my comments only help prove my point. People just can't deal with reality, so they childishly lash out instead.

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protist 13 points 6 months ago

Institutional investors have tended to cluster their purchases, resulting in more concentrated investments in certain neighborhoods in a handful of markets, including Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Charlotte, and Tampa. The 2024 GAO report found that they own 25% of single-family rental homes in Atlanta and 21% of those in Jacksonville. Researchers have found that mega landlords may have contributed to the rise in housing costs, particularly in areas where they're heavily concentrated.

https://www.businessinsider.com/...

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grue 1 point 6 months ago

The best proof you can come up with is that mega landlords "may have contributed?" It can't even state it definitively or quantify how much?

Forgive me if I'm not persuaded.

Meanwhile, I actually live in one of the cities you mentioned, so let me give you some real perspective: even if we assumed that every single one of the 25% of homes owned by institutional investors were being kept vacant for some stupid reason -- which, to be clear, they are not -- transferring ownership to owner-occupants would only increase the amount of housing available by 33%. In contrast, even just the relatively minor reform of allowing ADUs on all single-family properties would increase it by up to 100%. Rezoning the R1 properties (rich people's mansions on minimum 2-acre lots) to R4 ("normal" middle-class housing on minimum 9000 sq. ft. lots) would increase it by up to 900% in those formerly R1 areas. And those two zoning changes still remain single-family! If we actually abolished it, we're talking about thousands of percent increases.

So having read that, which idea do you think actually would have a bigger effect: abolishing institutional real estate investors or zoning reform?

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athatet 9 points 6 months ago

Just so you’re aware, downvotes have never proven someone’s point.

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gandalf_der_12te 2 points 6 months ago

thank you for your comment. just to add to it:

If you have a 1 km² (one square kilometer, = 1 million square meters) area. And the law dictates that only single-family houses can be built on it, with a minimum lot size of 500 m² each, then assuming 4 people per house, you can build 2000 houses in that area or house around 8000 people.

If you allow multi-family houses. Such as i live in one in Austria. Close to the city. The house has a lot size of about 1000 m² (with a big park in the middle), and 25 people live in it. If you build houses like that, you can house around 25000 people. More than triple!

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Zombie 21 points 6 months ago

1 in every 25 homes in England are empty

https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/

Over 15 million American homes — approximately 10% of the country’s housing inventory — were vacant in 2024.

https://usafacts.org/...

But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don't make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes...

There's certainly no market manipulation that renders supply and demand utter bollocks.

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Eheran 3 points 6 months ago

As the other person mentions, vacant homes in some rural area are irrelevant when you can not work there. Look at Japan if you want to see that dialed up to 11.

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gandalf_der_12te 2 points 6 months ago

10% of houses being unoccupied sounds like a lot to me. I would guess that a maximum of 3% would be a healthy amount.

I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don't use? If you are a company, how do you get more dollars per year from a house that's empty than one that is occupied and giving you rent?

Let's make an example. Rent let's say is $1000/month, which is $12k per year. How do you make $12k per year from owning a house without renting it out?

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Objection 4 points 6 months ago

They make money through speculation. Property values increase over time as the surrounding area becomes more developed and economically advanced, even if the specific property remains exactly the same, allowing property owners to extract value from other people's work improving the area even if they never set foot there.

Keeping the building unoccupied avoids the hassle of evicting tenants, allowing them to trade more quickly.

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gandalf_der_12te 1 point 6 months ago

Property values increase over time as the surrounding area becomes more developed and economically advanced,

they will actually decrease long-term (in most areas) as the population is shrinking, meaning less demand for housing.

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PancakesCantKillMe 4 points 6 months ago

I have friend that lives in Vegas. They are stuck in the house they bought since the private equity ownership seems to be keeping a ton of empty homes off the market to keep scarcity and thus prices high. These companies have deep pockets and can weather the storm over long periods until the market shifts in their favor again.

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bountygiver 1 point 6 months ago

By driving up the average price of a house, those housing left sitting in their portfolio all goes up in valuation, which in turn giving them more borrowing power to buy more houses.

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grue 1 point 6 months ago

I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use?

In the long run, they don't. It's a speculative bubble right now, but eventually they have to sell to somebody who intends for the property to be occupied because that's the only way to get actual value out of it.

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grue -4 points 6 months ago

None of those statistics ever take into account where the empty homes are. It doesn't matter if houses in the middle of nowhere are empty because nobody wants to live there. What matters is how many homes are allowed to exist closer in to the cities where people actually want to live.

But sure, we just need to build more poorly made, for maximum profit, homes that definitely don’t make giant corporations lots of money whilst simultaneously destroying green spaces, communities, and any form of third places within walkable distance of the poorly made homes…

That's absolutely ass-backwards bullshit. Back in reality, building density is what creates walkability, not what destroys it! Quit being dishonest.

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reallykindasorta 11 points 6 months ago

I’m sure when we build more properties Blackrock won’t continue to buy them as well as the 1/3 they already own in my city. Maybe they don’t have enough money to invest in more properties? Or maybe more housing will drive property values down enough so they’re not a good investment for blackrock anymore? What exactly is the success outcome you envision without banning investment properties?

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grue 2 points 6 months ago

Maybe they don’t have enough money to invest in more properties? Or maybe more housing will drive property values down enough so they’re not a good investment for blackrock anymore? What exactly is the success outcome you envision without banning investment properties?

Exactly that. Pretending that zoning restricting the supply isn't the problem plays right into the investors hands, because the supply shortage is what juices their investment returns!!!

And by the way: sure, fine, we could ban institutional investors from owning housing -- whatever, I literally do not care. What actually matters is the fact that even with them gone, if the zoning doesn't change we will still have all of the same problems because everyone will still be wanting to cram themselves into cities and the law will still be preventing the housing from accommodating them all. The unmet demand will continue to make prices skyrocket even if every bidder is a would-be owner-occupant, and everyone else will be forced out and have to commute back in, with all the negative consequences in terms of traffic, pollution, obesity, etc. that entails.

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reallykindasorta 4 points 6 months ago

So you think we can build enough housing to drive housing down so much that it’s no longer useful as an investment therefore it doesn’t matter if we’re competing with companies on the market?

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grue 1 point 6 months ago

Maybe, maybe not, but I think it's worth a try! And even if it fails to do that, we would have accidentally built nicer places to live anyway -- the horror!

Too bad the authoritarian NIMBY temporarily-embarrassed landlords infesting this thread are too enraged at the idea to even allow it to be considered.

(Also, I added to my previous comment after you replied. Might help answer your question.)

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athatet 7 points 6 months ago

There are enough empty houses in the US to give FOUR to every unhoused person. It is NOT a supply issue.

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grue -4 points 6 months ago

For the third(?) time in this thread alone, houses in bumfuck nowhere don't count! Real estate is local. Demand is local. Location is not fungible, and a house in the exurbs is not equivalent to one in a walkable urban neighborhood.

You are not fucking entitled to pretend that housing shortages in cities don't exist just because other houses exist in some shitty place nobody wants to be somewhere else!

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athatet 0 points 6 months ago

Well you’re wrong.

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4am 7 points 6 months ago

Shouldn’t be a market for housing or healthcare

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chunes 3 points 6 months ago

If you really think 'authoritarian' laws help them, it's because the laws don't go far enough.

There are four empty homes for every homeless person in this country. I can think of a few laws that would fix it overnight.

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gezero 3 points 6 months ago path: 0 23405015 23405412, hotness: undefined, score: 3, children: 4
DrBob 2 points 6 months ago

That was a plot on Little House on the Prairie.

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grue -5 points 6 months ago

A farm auction in rural Nebraska, where the land is exactly the polar opposite of scarce, has fuck-all to do with my point about density in cities.

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gezero 5 points 6 months ago

I think your attitude is missing an even bigger picture on top of your bigger markets picture. People can be black rock assholes masturbating with their invisible hands or they can be nice to each other. Markets will adapt...

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KAtieTot 1 point 6 months ago

Yeah man, the answer is social ridicule and not regulations 🙄

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cassandrafatigue 2 points 6 months ago

There is a supply problem. There is some dumb shit.

But like fixing the climate, none of it matters while a billionaire still draws breathe

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sik0fewl 2 points 6 months ago

It's concerning that people don’t seem to understand this.

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A404 2 points 6 months ago

Good luck with that

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gandalf_der_12te -4 points 6 months ago

Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.

no, unfortunately people don't seem to get that. there's a serious shortage of mathematics and statistics skill in the average lemmy user. i think to actually improve the world one must study mathematics and use it to properly interpret the data about our world that we need to understand and handle it. which i hope somebody does more of. In fact it would be nice to see more lemmy posts about this.

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Objection 2 points 6 months ago

You could start by practicing what you preach and actually substantiating any of these claims.

do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.

Who is defending which "authoritarian laws that distort the market in there favor" here? I legitimately have no idea what that's referring to. Zoning laws? Are there any comments on here that are actually saying that?

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grue -2 points 6 months ago

Who is defending which “authoritarian laws that distort the market in there favor” here? I legitimately have no idea what that’s referring to. Zoning laws? Are there any comments on here that are actually saying that?

I'm being massively downvoted for advocating for zoning reform, so yes, that's what people here are conveying even if you carefully phrased your question as a "gotcha" to try to pretend that doesn't count.

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Objection 3 points 6 months ago

People aren't downvoting you for saying zoning is a problem, they're downvoting you for saying Blackrock isn't a problem.

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flippanarchy
flippanarchy

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Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.

Post humorous takes on capitalism and the states which prop it up. Memes, shitposting, screenshots of humorous good takes, discussions making fun of some reactionary online, it all works.

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